John Saul - Darkness

The prescription she’d never filled.

She flattened the form out and laid it next to the birth certificate.

The scrawl of the attending obstetrician’s first name matched the last name of her own doctor.

The first three letters of the obstetrician’s last name matched the corresponding scribble of the first syllable of Warren Phillips’s own signature.

She stared at the two signatures for a long time, telling herself it wasn’t possible, that it was merely a strange coincidence, that neither of the signatures was actually even legible.

They were nothing more than doctors’ scribblings.

The denials still tumbling in her mind, she spoke to Mary Anderson. “There’s something wrong,” she said quietly. “Mary. I think this birth certificate is a fake.”

Mary Anderson’s eyes clouded. “Barbara, it’s the certificate we were given by the agency. Why would they—”

“Let’s call the hospital, Mary,” Barbara broke in. “Please?”

Ten minutes later Barbara felt a cold numbness spreading through her body.

The hospital in Orlando was real.

The birth certificate was not.

There was no record of an Irene Richardson giving birth to a child in the hospital.

No record of an Infant Richardson at all.

No Dr. Philip Waring had ever been connected with the hospital in any way.

When the phone call was over, the two women looked at each other, Mary Anderson now feeling as numbed as Barbara Sheffield. “What are we going to do?” Mary asked, suddenly fully understanding — and sharing — Barbara’s obsession to find the truth of Kelly’s origins.

Barbara barely heard the question, for she already knew what had to be done.

She wondered if she would be able to bear to stand in the cemetery one more time, gazing at the crypt in which her first child lay.

She wondered if she would be able to watch them open it.

But most of all, she wondered if she would be able to stand the awful reality of finding it empty.

• • •

Tim Kitteridge sighed heavily, his large hands spreading across his desk in a gesture of helplessness as he faced Ted Anderson. “I still don’t see what it is you expect me to do. If your father’s sick—”

“He’s worse than sick,” Ted exploded. “He’s dying. He’s dying, and he’s gone off into the swamp somewhere!”

“Now, you don’t know that,” Kitteridge replied. “All you know is that he wasn’t in his office. That’s a big development out there—”

“I searched it,” Ted repeated for what seemed like the fifth time. He felt his temper rising, but struggled to control it. After he’d left his father early that morning, he’d gone to Warren Phillips’s house and then to the hospital.

Phillips had been in neither place, nor did anyone know where he might be. “I’ll page him,” Jolene Mayhew had told him, but after five minutes with no reply to the page, he’d demanded an ambulance, and gone back out to the construction site.

To find that his father was gone.

Taking the paramedics with him, he’d searched every house on the site, every possible place where his father could have been hiding. When the crew had arrived for work, he’d sent them out, too, certain that somewhere on the hundred acres of Villejeune Links Estates his father would be found.

But there had been nothing.

Nothing, until one of the men had found tracks at the edge of the canal. That was when he’d come to the police station and tried to enlist Tim Kitteridge’s help. He’d told him the whole story, but even as he talked, he’d seen the skepticism in the police chief’s eyes.

“Now come on, Anderson,” Kitteridge had told him after he’d described how his father had looked early that morning. “Nobody ages like that overnight. And I know your father — he’s strong as an ox, and works harder than most men half his age.”

“And he looks half his age, too,” Ted had shot back. “Phillips has been giving him some kind of shots. I don’t know what they are, but I saw what happened to him a week ago. It was like watching the fountain of youth or something. He was feeling really bad, and looking terrible, and an hour later he was fine! But this morning he looked like he was dying!”

Kitteridge’s eyes rolled. “If he was really dying, I find it hard to believe he took off into the swamp. And I can’t start sending out search parties every time someone goes in there. Especially not for someone who’s lived here all his life. If your dad wanted to take off for a while, that’s his business, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Ted glared angrily at the police chief. “What about Phillips? Dad saw him this morning — he told me so himself. And now he’s gone. He’s not home, and he’s not at the hospital. Where is he?”

Kitteridge felt his own temper rising now. “Look, Mr. Anderson,” he said, his voice hard. “I don’t know what you think my job is, but I can tell you it’s not to go hunting for people who are minding their own business. You told me yourself that Phillips was out of whatever medicine he was giving your father. Maybe he went to get more of it. Did that ever occur to you?”

“Jesus Christ,” Ted swore, making no attempt to check his anger any longer. “If whatever he was giving Dad was something he could just pick up in Orlando, why the hell would he run out? Dad says he makes it himself. Aren’t you even interested in what he might be giving the people around here? It’s drugs, goddamn it! And you don’t seem to give a shit!”

Kitteridge rose to his feet, but just as he was about to speak, the phone on his desk jangled loudly. He snatched it up. “Yes?” he snapped into the mouthpiece. But as he listened, the angry scowl that was directed at Ted Anderson began to fade. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be right out there. And I’m bringing Ted Anderson with me.” He placed the receiver back on the hook. When he looked back at Ted, his impatience had turned to uncertainty. “That was Phil Stubbs,” he said. “One of the tour boats just came in. There’s been a kidnapping. He said an old man came out of the swamp and lifted a baby right out of the boat.”

Ted said nothing, but felt a cold knot of fear forming in his stomach.

“Your daughter was there,” Kitteridge went on. “She saw the whole thing, and says she knows who the man was.”

“Dad,” Ted breathed. “It was my father, wasn’t it?”

Kitteridge nodded.

Together, the two men left the police station.

• • •

Barbara Sheffield barely nodded to her husband’s secretary as she passed through the small front office of his two-room suite over the hardware store and walked into the large room where Craig worked. He was on the telephone as she came through the doorway, but when he saw the look on her face, he abruptly cut his conversation short, rising to his feet.

“Barbara? What’s happened?”

She silently crossed the room to drop a folded sheet of heavy yellowed vellum onto his desk. He picked it up, stared at it blankly for a moment, then looked curiously at his wife. “What’s this?”

When she spoke, Barbara heard the hollowness in her own voice. “Kelly Anderson’s birth certificate. Except that nothing on it is true. And I’m sure Warren Phillips forged the signature.” The emotions she’d been holding in check by the sheer force of her will suddenly boiled up inside her. She sank into the chair in front of Craig’s desk, her eyes flooding with tears. Moving around the desk, Craig dropped down to kneel next to her, putting his arm around her.

“Honey, what’s going on? What are you doing to yourself?”

Doing to myself? Barbara echoed silently. The fear she’d been feeling turned into anger, and she pulled herself free of her husband’s embrace. “I’m not doing anything!” she exclaimed, her voice rising. “All I’m trying to do is find out what’s been done to me! To me, and to our little girl. She’s not dead, Craig! Can’t you understand?”